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Executive Summary

Environment America is a federation of 28 statebased,
citizen-funded environmental advocacy
organizations. Our professional staff and hundreds
of thousands of members, allies and activists across
the nation and in Washington, D.C., combine independent
research, practical ideas and tough-minded
advocacy and organizing to overcome the opposition
of powerful special interests and win real results for
the environment.

Over the last year, the advocates and activists in the
Environment America federation have made major
progress at the federal, state and local levels—from
passing strong energy efficiency laws in New Jersey,
Washington, Oregon and Illinois, to protecting
Florida’s Everglades from development. With concern
for the environment remaining a high priority
for citizens and their elected officials nationwide,
Environment America is becoming a powerful new
force for environmental progress in our country.
Environment America and our federation of state
environmental groups produce this regular report
on key votes in Congress as one of our many tools
to help citizens engage in and impact environmental
policy. The scorecard is distributed online, to our
entire membership, and through our door-to-door
canvass in cities and towns across the country.
The 2009 Scorecard looks at the key environmental
votes taken between May 2007 and September
2009.

Energy Takes Center Stage

From the November 2008 elections to the current
debate in Congress, the environment has been at
the forefront of our nation’s political and economic
attention. With broad based public support for strong
action on energy and global warming, a diverse array
of voices has joined the effort to reduce our use of

Overview

Moving forward on these issues and investing
in a true clean energy revolution will also help
the country create green jobs, speed our economic
recovery and improve international security.
Throughout the 2008 election, presidential nominees
from both major parties dedicated significant
energy to the issues of clean energy, breaking our
dependence on oil, and stopping global warming.

This created broad consensus on putting a mandatory
limit on global warming pollution as a policy
approach to reducing carbon emissions and boosted
the already broad public support for dramatically
increasing our use of clean renewable energy. Wind
turbines and solar panels were ubiquitous in campaign
advertising from the presidential to the local
level, and campaign polling showed support across
demographics and geography for clean energy solutions.

The attention to clean energy and global warming
has also been reflected in the policy debate in
Washington, D.C. Over the course of the politically
charged and largely gridlocked summer of 2008, the
House and Senate voted more than a dozen times
to extend basic tax credits for clean energy and efficiency
before finally passing them in to law as a
part of the financial bailout package during the fall.

This hard-won progress reflects both the dedication
to the solutions on the part of some environmental
leaders, and the challenges we face in winning bipartisan
support for even the most basic and popular
of policy solutions.

With the inauguration of Barack Obama and the
seating of the 111th Congress, we saw quick approval
of more than $80 billion in funding for clean energy
and green transportation, through the American
Recovery and Reinvestment Act. In addition, the
House of Representatives passed the first of its kind
comprehensive legislation to tackle global warming
and energy security.

This new level of activity and progress in Washington
is in part a reflection on the change in political
leadership in Washington, but also on the increased
conviction by many across the ideological, geographic
and demographic spectrums that a top priority for
our country is to dramatically change the way we use
and generate energy.

Solutions for a Change

In our 2008 report, we noted the significant shift
from defensive to solution-oriented votes between
2006 and 2008 (from 29 percent to 64 percent
of votes being solution-oriented). That trend has
continued, with 85 percent of the votes we scored
being solution oriented. What is more, the measures
reaching and being signed by the President also reflect
greater progress on solutions, most notably in
the passage of the American Recovery and Reinvestment
Act, which contained an historic $80 billion
of funding for clean energy and green transportation
investments, and with the passage of the Omnibus
Public Lands Act, which will provide protections to
2 million acres of public lands and other national
treasures.

The continuing trend to more solution oriented
votes has also been accompanied by more Environmental
Champions and fewer Environmental Disasters
(members of Congress who get a 100 percent or
0 percent score respectively). Both the House and
the Senate saw more Champions than in years past,
with the House going from 124 in 2008 to 146 in
2009, and the Senate going from 20 in 2008 to 45
in 2009. When it comes to the Disasters, the Senate
seems to have a stable foundation of members who
consistently vote against the environment, up to
27 this year from 21 last year. The House however
tells a different story. Even after taking a significant
plunge from 114 Disasters in 2006 to 67 in 2008, this
year found only 17 House members who seem wholly
committed to the anti-environmental position.

We would argue that the increased focus on solution
oriented votes is not only good for the environment,
but also helps identify those who are the most recalcitrant
anti-environmental legislators.

Biggest Challenges Remain

While we have noted progress on almost every front,
from the public debate to the productivity of solutions
in Washington, the clear story is still one of
unfinished business. Major progress on issues across
the environment is still elusive or unresolved. The
Clean Water Restoration Act has made glacial progress
and still has a long way to go before passage. The
House passage of the American Clean Energy and
Security Act represents critical progress on global
warming, but we are rapidly running out of time to
achieve the objectives laid out for us by scientists at
home and abroad. Furthermore, the federal debate
on renewable energy lags action in the states and
public support by unacceptable levels, signaling
the persistence of political power by coal, oil and
nuclear interests inside Washington. The renewable
electricity standard contained in the House-passed
energy and climate bill (H.R. 2454) is weaker than
the standards set by many of the states. The energy
bill passed by the Senate energy committee is so
riddled with dirty energy provisions that it is opposed
by Environment America and many others.

Investments in public transportation have received
a shot in the arm from the American Recovery and
Reinvestment Act, but Washington is still wrestling
with the core reforms of our federal transportation
policy that we need. We still invest the vast majority
of federal transportation dollars to roads through
a profoundly flawed process that undermines other
efforts to clean our environment and reduce our
carbon emissions.

Many of these issues that stand unfinished are ripe
for action, and it is likely that the votes of the next
six months will answer the question of how much
progress the 111th Congress can make in protecting
our air, land and water, and whether we can truly
signal a national commitment to tackle the problem
of global warming pollution.